Revell (Italeri reboxed) 1:72 with Eduard photoetched zoom set, Balkan Models ‘Last Flight over Balkans’ decal sheet, Northstar models LAU-117 with AGM-65 and Mk.82s from Hasegawa weapons set. Check the Work in Progress in the menu above if you are interested in all the work that needed to be done to bring up this model to the 1999 version.

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As you are probably wondering about the green engine nacelle – This model represents a bird, that was used in 1999 Operation Allied Force, over Serbia. The incident happened on May 2nd, 1999 and the pilot that day was Major Paul “Goldie” Haun. He was tasked a FAC-A duty over Eastern Kosovo, which was relatively calm those days, with most of the action going on in Western part of it. Lynx 11 was his callsign that day; joining him as his wingman (Lynx 12) was Captain Andy “Buffy” Gebara, an ex-B-52 pilot. The pair worked some 30miles north over Pristina when he spotted a single 2S1 122mm self-propelled artillery piece near a tree line. As AWACS was closing down the East part of Kosovo due to the lack of SEAD assets, Goldie had just one shot of taking out that target. He got an unsteady lock on the targets and decided to test his luck and launched Maverick which hit the target. Retreating South he spotted two tanks in some valley near Gnjilane town and marked their position and proceeded to tanker for aerial refueling. He managed to get 20 minutes of SEAD support and pushed with the attack… Unfortunately he messed up his initial run and broke off the attack and reengaged but couldn’t get a Maverick lock on the targets, while Mk.82s were not accurate enough for such attack. The decision was made that Buffy should drop two Mk.82s on the target while Goldie will follow with a gun straffe. Buffy saw some good gun hits on the targets but momentarily lost view of Goldie. And that’s when Goldie reported “I’m hit!” MANPAD, probably Strela 2 or Igla, hit Goldie’s right engine and he had to struggle to keep the aircraft as stable as possible. To make things even worse, he was now flying at lower altitude, in the reach of bad guys SAM and AAA systems. They headed towards South, towards Macedonia, towards safety. It was later discovered that even left engine was quite damaged from ingesting bits and pieces of the left one and the missile. He had to maintain 1 degree nose down attitude just to keep the airspeed. Finally he managed to reach Skopje in Macedonia and successfully landed. As for the green nacelle. The below photos show you the damaged bird and the progress during replacement of the engine. My best bet would be, that the replacement arrived from Davis-Monthan AFB, from a Euro-1 painted bird.

If you want to read more about this incident as well as A-10 operations in Allied Force, you can get a free e-book A-10s over Kosovo here: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a421682.pdf

Below photographs were found on the internet, some appear to be stills from the video.